Thursday, August 27, 2015

THE SIXTH EXTINCTION

THE SIXTH EXTINCTIONWe modern day humans are the human equivalent of an asteroid strike. We have fouled the atmosphere, acidified the oceans, deforested the rain forest and introduced invasive species around the world to the result that humankind will, at some point in the not so distant future, pay the price.

Excerpt from Los Angeles Times
article: Ancestral Diet Gone Toxic

By Marla
Cone

The arctic Inuit are being contaminated
by pollution borne north by winds and concentrated as it travels up the food
chain

About 200
hazardous compounds, which migrate from industrialized regions and accumulate
in ocean-dwelling animals, have been detected in the inhabitants of the far
north.

The bodies
of Arctic people, particularly Greenland's Inuit, contain the highest human
concentrations of industrial chemicals and pesticides found anywhere on Earth
-- levels so extreme that the breast milk and tissues of some Greenlanders
could be classified as hazardous waste.

1987, Dr.
Eric Dewailly, an epidemiologist at Laval University in Quebec, was surveying
contaminants in breast milk of mothers near the industrialized, heavily
polluted Gulf of St. Lawrence when he met a midwife from Nunavik, the Arctic
portion of Quebec province. She asked whether he wanted to gather milk samples
from women there.

A few months
later, the first batch of samples from Nunavik -- glass vials holding a
half-cup of milk from each of 24 women -- arrived by air mail at the lab in
Quebec. Dewailly soon got a phone call
from the lab director. Something was wrong with the Arctic milk. The chemical
concentrations were off the charts. The peaks overloaded the lab's equipment,
running off the page. The technician thought the samples must have been tainted
in transit. Upon checking more breast
milk, the scientists soon realized that the peaks were, in fact, accurate: The
Arctic mothers had seven times more PCBs in their milk than mothers in Canada's
biggest cities.

It is one thing to be ignorant; it is another to be Georgia Republican Paul Broun and head the House Science, Space and Technology Committee in Congress.What hope is there to avoid the Sixth Extenction?the Ol'Buzzard

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